Spent most of this morning on the phone, trying to wrangle all of my other appointments around the iodine treatment schedule – since that’s the one that is the most important, and the one that effectively removes a week of possible scheduling time from my life. 😒

EDIT: Just got off of another call with Dr Walter’s office. We’re now trying to figure out how much of a pain in the ass it’s going to cause… me being seen by his PA rather than directly by him, because Dr Walter is my “physician of record” when it comes to anything related to my workers comp claim – and they love finding any reason that they can to deny me treatment or medication. 😠 This sounds like it will be a work in progress, and we probably won’t know what the negative side effects are until they happen.

Went back to the dentist to get the last bit of my root canal done and was fitted with a temporary crown. A temporary crown which feels like it’s squeezing the life out of the little nub of tooth that it was mounted on. 😒 Jaw aches… head aches… I’m just hoping that the final version ends up fitting more comfortably than this one is. I’ve got to wait about a week and a half to find out.

Shortly after that it’ll be time for the radioactive iodine treatment. That means in the next couple of days I’ll need to start my low iodine diet. I guess the thyroid tends to attract all the iodine that enters your body, so you basically want to starve it for a couple of weeks so when the radioactive stuff is introduced – if there are any thyroid / cancer cells left, in theory they’ll be destroyed. 😐 I’ve chosen not to google too much about all of this, so I’m not sure exactly how the full scan will go afterwards, or how nervous I should be.

But in preparation for that I went grocery shopping today and picked out some things that are on the “okay” list. I don’t really eat much anyway, and the stuff that I’ll be allowed to eat isn’t that bad… just different from the normal canned or boxed stuff that I usually eat. Fresh meat, salads, fresh vegetables, meh… it’ll be fine. Just more dishes than usual.

My friend that was diagnosed with lung cancer a little less than three years ago… she entered hospice care over the weekend. 😕 She actually had to go into ICU for a bit, but they got her stabilized enough to return back home. It just is what it is. And what it is, is scary… seeing what has happened to someone that was “fine” and just went to the doctor for a cough three years ago, having never smoked, having never had any serious health problems… and yeah… fast forward to today, three years later. 😞

I’m not feeling too great, so I’m gonna keep this post short. Today was the day that Jim and his brother were going to the county fair, and he also wanted to drop off the Phil Collins concert ticket that he got me – so I just saved him the extra driving and time and met them at the fair. I wasn’t much fun for the Sweet Corn Festival, and I’m not sure I was a whole lot more fun today, but I did make an appearance. Plus I wanted to get some longer “real-world” footage with the 360 camera and take some “portrait mode” iPhone shots to see what Facebook’s new “3D” algorithm could do with them.

(Wow… vertical video shows up bigger than I expected. Click to make it “screen sized” at bottom of vid.)

It’s a neat little trick that they’ve come up with… something that I wish the phone could do natively… but it’s also something that once everyone and their brother learns how to do it, the motion sickness that it may cause will probably be enough that the peanut gallery starts demanding a button to disable this nerdy new trick entirely. But I’m feeling a little too “off” to fuss with that 360 video right now… not sure when I’ll get around to it, but don’t be surprised if it sits on the back burner for a while.

Not thrilled with how my dentist appointment went yesterday. The root canal, to prepare for a crown, was first – and I ended up spending two hours in the chair. Some of that was waiting for the numbing agent to work, but a lot of that time was because she had her office overbooked – and she kept working on me a bit, leaving for a bit to work on other patients, then back to me again. She had to have done this about a half-dozen times… enough that by the end of it all the numbness was wearing off.

Now, I know that what she was doing with my tooth was difficult, and she had to use different tools and try this and that… but in my opinion, once she started working on me that should have been it. And the “rooms” are actually somewhat in the same common area, so it’s not like I can’t hear her working with someone else during the moments she was taking a break with me. And when I said “by the end” it didn’t actually mean that she completed the task. It means I had enough of the pain and the pauses and I told her to either get it wrapped up or put a temporary filling in it and I’d return at a later date when she could actually finish uninterrupted.

I honestly wouldn’t go back to her if the impression hadn’t already been taken of that tooth, and the process of shaping the tooth for the crowd having already been started. But the second dentist working there, after they numbed me up a second time, she came in and got my wisdom tooth out in about five minutes. Granted, her job was just down and dirty with much less finesse required, but I was thankful to get it done and get out of there. It was an awful sounding process… lots of cracking, breaking, digging… *shudder* I’d hate to have actually seen it from a 3rd person point of view.

My entire day after that appointment was fucked… think about two hours of having my mouth pulled this way or that way, opening as wide as I can, and then of course all of the actual trauma to my mouth. Couldn’t even close my mouth during the times where she wasn’t in the room, due to the bite guard. Felt like someone hit me with a 2×4… it kept me from falling asleep and woke me up a few times during the night once I did. So yeah, one of my worst dentist experiences by far. As soon as the crown is in and I know that I can’t be messed with, I’m gonna make sure someone hears my complaint. Take two hours on my mouth, fine, but don’t go running away so often that half of the time in that chair was spent either watching TV or micro-napping.

Pardon the length of this entry, but yesterday was kinda tough, basically as I anticipated. Anxiety had me up most of the night, so I ended up doing all this stuff on only three hours of sleep – but at least that meant I was awake at dawn, so I could just hop up and start getting ready instead of grumbling at my multiple alarms squawking at me every two minutes until I rise and shine.

From 8am until 12.5pm I was doing “something medical.” 😐 Starting with my monthly neck doctor appointment, where we also covered my upcoming surgery, some of the medications that I might have to start taking because of it, and how they should or shouldn’t react with whatever meds I’m getting from him for my fusion spot, nerve damage, and grumpy muscles in the area. 😳👨🏻‍⚕️

Next was another blood draw for multiple panels of testing. 💉 I already had this done a little over a month ago, but they not only wanted to get the most current results, but there were also specific tests that they needed that weren’t in my other test. I volunteered my right arm, and the girl did her best… I mean, she hit the biggest vein available there, but for some reason it was only spitting a little bit of blood – and it was definitely not enough to fill the three vials needed. 😯 My left arm ended up being successful, and of course now I look like a junkie with two big bruises on each elbow-pit. 😏

Next was the electrocardiogram, which actually didn’t take that long due to it (thankfully) not including stress testing or anything like that. Just the normal dozen-or-so electrical leads, a few minutes of holding really still, and on to the next. 🙂 But the next thing was where it started to get shitty. 😥

Since they’re going to have to manipulate my head quite a bit while they’re working on my neck, and since they’re aware of the C5-C7 fusion, they had to take a crapload of x-rays while my head and neck were in extremely stretched, compressed, or otherwise super-uncomfortable positions. ☢😣 I do my best each day to not move my head in all of the ways that I had to do for those x-rays, so my neck was fucked after everything was said and done. 🙇🏻‍♂️ So not only will my surgery site be painful, but the ways they are gonna have to move my huge lump-of-a-head around while I’m under anesthesia… let’s just say that I’m really not looking forward to how that area’s gonna be feeling when I wake up.

I almost wasn’t able to complete all the scans that they needed, since one of them (while standing) was given with the instructions of “Put both of your arms straight up, directly over your head.” 😧 If there was a bar or something above my head I could have done it with little issue, but the only way I could do it without my left arm shaking was to get the arm up there, then actually lean against the plate/target of the x-ray machine to basically jam it up there in that position. 😬🤷🏻‍♂️ The fella doing it was really patient and understanding, and after reviewing them he said that the results should be fine, including that one which I thought would be pretty uncertain.

And I know, to a healthy person that all probably doesn’t sound like much… but man was I worn out after everything was done. 😓 Between the lack of sleep, the multiple stops, the blood loss… heh, the painful x-rays, and then my leg jumping around between “fine” and “omg stop” heh… I was just thankful that I was able to knock all of that stuff out in one day, along with being able to just go home and recover at my own pace. 😔 It’s all good though… all of this stuff is now done with a couple weeks to spare, so I’m just happy to keep everything on track.

No updates for a while due to various circumstances. Thyroid biopsy was done a little over a week ago, which wasn’t as bad as I expected – but also more serious than I expected. 🤔👨🏻‍⚕️ Other than the doctor using a needle rather than actually cutting me open, it was actually a real deal procedure. Hooked up to monitors, in my gown, rolled from the waiting room to the procedure room… and then a couple nurses or technicians dealing with the ultrasound and instruments, while the doctor repeatedly jabbed me in the neck with a thicker-than-I’d-have-preferred needle. 😯💉 It took three different “pokes” to get enough cells for the tests that they needed to run, but the folks were all great, and always spoke in a very calming way that made it not nearly as anxiety inducing as it could have been.

Then on Monday I made it to my first of four dentist appointments. 😳 Rather than attack my whole mouf at once, they figured it would be easier on my face (and at least psychologically, on my wallet) if we split up the work on my teefs. So that appointment was a deep cleaning on the bottom, and then a gum line filling on one of the right rear molars. A little uncomfortable since they had to use a tool to push my gums down until the filling was complete, but I was good and numb so it didn’t really hurt until much later into the day.

Things have been hit and miss with my sciatic issue. Some days it’s almost unnoticeable, and then others there’s a continuous mild pain with some sharp bursts that also come with some weakness. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’ve got a followup appointment with my chiropractor in the first week of next month, and I guess I’m still gonna go see him – just so I can update him in case I have my doctor doctor contact him for my info, when I ask her to look into this problem for me through whatever avenue she thinks might help.

And then my biopsy results… they came back a day sooner than I was expecting, and I actually got the call from the specialist on my way home from the dentist. 😒 They can’t really tell you anything definite from a small sample like that, so he says surgery is in my future. 😐 I actually had an appointment with him earlier yesterday, and I left feeling about as optimistic as possible when talking about this sort of thing. Like I had already been doing myself, he pointed out many reasons that I should feel far more optimistic than the average person when it comes to this – especially noting that sometimes people have thyroid defects that grow for years and years, and are never even discovered until they’ve grown to a size where it interferes with a person’s swallowing or breathing. 😧

There’s way too much to the situation to get into real detail, but I’ll just say that his “matter of fact” way (in a good way) of talking about the surgery, the treatment, the positive results that he expects and has gotten many times before in others… it helped provide a little ease to a decidedly uneasy thing to think about. So, it’ll come, we’ll hope for the best, and if that isn’t enough, we’ll just face whatever the next thing is after that. I think that things will be fine, even if not on the first try.

Had a bit of a setback with my back yesterday. 😥 The pain woke me up around 4am, and a quick trip to the bathroom made me realize that the strength/ability in my right leg wasn’t really there. I probably just slept on something wrong, but rather than dwell on it and get upset about it, I decided to devote the first half of the day to staying in bed, watching movies, and eating a few boxes of that ready-to-make chicken salad and crackers. 🐖 I could still find certain ways to lay that would alleviate the pain, so I just did that and totally plucked myself from what would have been my “normal” routine, and plopped myself into this “being a potato in bed” zone that was outside of my normal timeline. 🧙🏻‍♂️ My weird way of trying to explain it anyway… but it worked… that half day of removing myself from everything but Netflix and the cat actually helped – and I was able to get up and around by the early afternoon.

As I was lying there though, I started pondering my various aches, pains, and disabilities… wondering which ones will get better, if any of them are starting to just stay with me, and how I’m gonna be as I get older and have to deal with compounding issues like this. 😟 Like I told Dad, I ended up coming to the conclusion that I’m only complaining as much as I have been because I still feel like I can recover or at least improve. 🤷🏻‍♂️ If the “bleh” feels temporary, it’s easy to bitch about it when it’s slow going… but honestly, and my neck is proof of this, I can learn to live with pain and disability – to the point where eventually it’s “just there”, sucking, but something I can compartmentalize for the most part. 😐 For the most part… ‘cuz there’s always super painful exceptions. Summarized, my bitching will eventually slow. 😏

In the evening I went in town to deliver those two Yi security cameras to my cousin. I’m obviously more excited about any kind of A/V tech than they would be, but I could still tell that she was having fun playing around with the one as she went through the setup process. 📹👩🏻 Matt’s already running through the possible installation locations, so as soon as they get a couple little memory cards they’ll be ready to roll. It’s crazy how even just five or ten years ago, creating any kind of home video security system was expensive and a pain in the ass. There’s no way that Yi makes any money off of these cameras. 🤨 I’m guessing they’re banking on people like me to sign up for the monthly cloud storage fee – which I don’t mind doing at all.

So anyway, despite feeling pretty rotten for the first half, it actually wasn’t that bad of a day overall – and it definitely made me happy to gift those cameras to Toni and Matt. ☺ I really hope that they never have any bad reason that they’ll need any of the footage that they record… but I’m glad that they’ll have those cameras just in case they do.